5 things you need to know about NSA phone tracking

Meyerrose, who said he wasn’t directly involved in intelligence-gathering during his time in office, said “collateral” information about phone calls that aren’t germane to the investigation would be purged.

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Senators tiptoe around NSA

Feinstein, Chambliss defend NSA

“If the NSA followed the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] court order — which I am positive that they would have — while they gather up that Joe in Atlanta called Susie in New York, that information would then be discarded,” he said.

3. Why does the NSA want this information?

America’s largest spy agency is charged with monitoring electronic communications around the world, and to do so it collects as much data as possible. Analysts at NSA’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Md., feed the phone data from Verizon into their powerful super-computers to try to draw conclusions about what it means that Person X is calling Person Y, as well as to share with other government agencies, including the FBI, for its investigations.

“They use large volumes of data and use algorithms to draw conclusions from that data,” said Wells Bennett, a fellow in national security law at the Brookings Institution. “The more data you have, the more inferences you can draw.”

A senior government official, who asked not to be identified because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court order is classified, defended the efficacy of the NSA’s practice.

“Information of the sort described in the Guardian article has been a critical tool in protecting the nation from terrorist threats to the United States, as it allows counterterrorism personnel to discover whether known or suspected terrorists have been in contact with other persons who may be engaged in terrorist activities, particularly people located inside the United States,” the official said.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) defended the government’s prerogative to see Americans’ phone records in the interest of protecting the country against its enemies.

“It is a worthy cause to try to find out people who may be communicating with people who are members of jihadist organizations … it is a matter of concern,” he said. “If all they’re doing is tracking where my phone calls went to, that doesn’t make me too concerned … it doesn’t matter to me particularly.”

4. Did Verizon agree to this or was this an involuntary mandate from the government?

The NSA has had a close relationship with the telecommunications industry for decades, including with the corporate ancestors of Verizon that ran the physical cable-and-trunk telephone networks. U.S. officials have used eavesdropping since J. Edgar Hoover’s G-Men hunted John Dillinger in the 1930s, and more recently, “signals intelligence” has played a central role in the pursuit of terrorists, especially in places where the United States has no human sources with a firsthand perspective of what’s going on.

In the post-Watergate era of deep unease about government power, Congress passed FISA, which acknowledged the necessity for monitoring and eavesdropping but which created a new secret court to establish more accountability over the executive branch. Congress has since broadened the government’s latitude in eavesdropping with the Patriot Act of 2001 and subsequent amendments to FISA, including one in 2008 that then-Sen. Barack Obama first opposed, then backed.

The senior government official made clear that the NSA is acting within what it believes are the bounds of the law and that it has oversight from the White House, Congress and the courts.

“As we have publicly stated before, all three branches of government are involved in reviewing and authorizing intelligence collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” the official said. “Congress passed that act and is regularly and fully briefed on how it is used, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court authorizes such collection. There is a robust legal regime in place governing all activities conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. That regime has been briefed to and approved by the court.”